Between the year just beginning and the one just ending, like two freights speeding past each other in opposite directions, or just ships passing in the night, there is a brief pause when the papers are full of year-enders looking fore and aft. And it’s time once again to hear from old Janus, the classical god who is well equipped to weigh both past and future, having two faces to peer both ahead and behind. Though every time his visage appears, usually at New Year’s, it’s tempting to warn him he needs to look sideways, too, for ambushes always await.
With those paired profiles of his, Janus made the perfect god of beginning and endings, entrances and exits, harbors and gateways. For those of us whose past is now longer than our future, it’s to be expected that our rear-view mirror should be clearer than our ever foggy crystal ball.
But getting the past right can be an uncertain assignment, too. Which may be why history tends to be one continuing revision, with interpretations going in and out of style depending on present preferences. History turns out to be a surer reflection of the times in which it is written than the times it purports to describe. Indeed, there may be no more contemporary art than a history of some past epoch.
The past, it turns out, is no more static than the future. It, too, is a plastic art. Which may be why the most carefully reasoned analyses of the past and its lessons, like the best-laid plans of mice and men, not to mention savants and prognosticators, go awry and have to be altered—and often enough the seams show. Especially when politicians and pundits try to wiggle out of old predictions that turned out to be less than prophetic. (Remember when one pseudo- philosopher assured us we were living at the End of History? Yet it continued, and continues still.) Being a prophet has its occupational hazards, as many a would-be prophet has discovered.
A writer named Dickens once summed up his time, or any time, in the opening lines of what would become a classic example of his style: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair . . . .” Take your pick, or mix and match, or just toss like a good salad.
Dickens’ elegant 19th-Century prose is the King James version of that age-old thought; the Revised Standard equivalent might be condensed into two words: Conditions vary.
Neither version would come up to the grace and wisdom, or power, shown by an earlier writer: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”—Ecclesiastes.
Summing up the past and peering into the future may be just another vanity of vanities, but it’s New Year’s, tradition is tradition, so here goes:
As 2014 fades and 2015 dawns, it can be predicted with certainty, or at least a high degree of probability, that Spain’s old dictator Francisco Franco will remain dead. And that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 will stay missing for some time, if not forever, along with any satisfactory explanation of its disappearance, But it’s a sure bet that a new cult of sci-fi fans, a branch of the Area 51 UFO Hunters Club, will come up with an answer to this mystery. (It was the work of space aliens. Isn’t everything?) It’s also predictable that (a) the world’s troubles will persist in 2015, and (b) that some of the most improbable hopes will become surprising realities. Especially in this ever-surprising country.
Another prediction: Our president will continue to unveil one simple plan after another in affairs foreign and domestic, and be obliged to alter them as he encounters the stubborn realities of a world that refuses to conform to his picture of it. He started out restating perhaps the oldest of American delusions, that America could withdraw from the rest of the world and all its troubles by appeasing our enemies. All we had to do was extend the hand of friendship to old foes like Teheran’s mullahs and the Kremlin’s latest stalinist occupant, and good old American isolationism would work at last, assuring peace and tranquility.
We can all see how well that has worked out, and why our president and commander-in-chief has had to go back to intervening forcefully around the world, whether re-dispatching forces to take on the same old Islamist terrorists with a new name (the Islamic State) and reset the reset he had announced in Russian-American relations. The moral of this old, old story: The price of ignoring evil in one part of the world, like the murderous civil war in Bashar al-Assad’s Syria or what’s left of it, is to encourage evil everywhere as its ripples spread.
The same hard lesson still waits to be learned where the Signature Accomplishment of this administration is concerned. Obamacare is turning out to be its signature mistake, a compendium of all its confusions, pretenses, and general incompetence. No wonder the (un)Affordable Care Act requires almost daily delays, exceptions, waivers, and fixes that don’t fix. The midterm elections of 2014 that delivered such a widespread rebuke to this White House and its “leadership” might as well have been a referendum on Obamacare and its namesake. Both were weighed in the balances and found wanting. The result amounted to a national vote of no confidence.
But there was also good news this past year, and every sign that it would continue. The nation’s economy is surging thanks in large part to the shale-oil revolution. Jobs multiply, the stock market sets records, gas prices tumble, along with the cost of fuel in general, and America’s enemies abroad, particularly the petro-tyrants who once looked so secure, now shudder in shale oil’s wake.
There will always be those economists who can see the downside of any piece of good news, but they’ll have to look harder to find it these happy days, which are here again. Who knows, maybe even our president will see the oil-fueled light and finally okay the Keystone XL pipeline, whose completion would only add to our, and the world’s, prosperity.
Hold on, Janus, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.